Free People Free People

An alternative to hurt people hurting people.

I'm staring at a bouquet of dried flowers in a mason jar on my table. They are beautiful this way, and they're supposed to go to seed so I can plant them myself. If you know my track record with gardening, you might just pray I leave them in the vase where they can do no harm.

Underneath the vase is a little card that reads: Liberation: I am free to be me.

Between Juneteenth and Independence Day and the long, unscheduled days that come with summer, freedom is the word of the season. Liberation is the more oomphy version — freedom in motion.

You've heard it said, whispered on therapists' couches and in long friend-to-friend phone calls: Hurt people hurt people. It's meant to comfort, to explain the inexplicable. It helps us make sense of our childhoods, our abusive relationships, the Why questions we keep circling: Why did they do that to me? Why am I like this? Why does this continue to harsh my mellow?

Hurt people hurt people, we say. And then we shrug and try to move on, holding this disturbing truth that there is a lot of pain in the world, and whether we fight it, accept it, or succumb to it, it will continue.

And yet.

Some other truths are also at work. Healing people heal people. Liberated people liberate others.

That's how you know someone is truly free — free from their past, free from their addiction, free from the chokehold a lover or a friend or an institution once had on them. You know they are free when they use that freedom to free someone else.

What does liberation look like to you?

I've been practicing it these days by listening, by holding hard and competing truths for people in the middle of transitions: for some, life on the other side of caregiving with that particular mix of grief and relief; for some, the relentless courage of untangling a shared life into one life, including assets and custody agreements; for some, liberation looks like asking themselves What could I dream up? instead of simply doing it the way the ones before them always did.

What is the shape of your liberation? What do you need freedom from?

It is a privilege to make this way with you,

Elaine

P.S. I'm opening up a couple of special spots this summer for 1:1 wayfinding clients - 3 sessions for $450. If this is you, just reply or pass the word on to whoever it is. 

This reflection is part of Wayfinder's Weekly, my free Monday newsletter for people navigating threshold seasons. Subscribe here